Rejecting Reward Hacking: My Four Years at University

AI translation notice: This English version was translated from the original Chinese article with AI assistance. Some nuances may differ from the original.

Over the past few days, I have said goodbye to one classmate after another. I stopped again and again at places I had passed countless times, looked around, and took many photos, reluctant to leave. I could not help looking back on my four years at university. Yet what kept returning to me was not only what I had done, but why I had made those choices at the time—and what might have been different if I could do it all again. To borrow a concept that has recently become popular: reject Reward Hacking, and refuse to turn your life into the maximization of a single metric.

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The previous few articles were all written around graduation—some were summaries from different angles, while others were simply scattered reflections. These four university years were undoubtedly the most vivid and consequential four of my twenty-two years of life. On the train leaving campus, I wrote this article to record the choices and experiences of those years, as a kind of private retrospective.

Reward Hacking is originally a concept from reinforcement learning. It describes an agent exploiting loopholes in a reward function to obtain a higher reward in an unintended way. At university, that reward function easily becomes tied to GPA, class rank, recommendation-based postgraduate admission, scholarships, and competition awards. These things certainly matter, and in many contexts they genuinely demonstrate a student's excellence. But if they become the final objective and learning and growth themselves are forgotten, the result can easily turn into a real-life form of Reward Hacking.

I did pay a small price over these four years for not having a higher GPA. If I could start again, perhaps I would strike a better balance. Even so, I want to record honestly what it felt like, in a meritocratic society where almost everyone is reminded to “optimize the metrics,” to rewrite my own reward function as: “Did I truly learn something? Do I understand society better? Am I closer to the person I wanted to become as a child?”

This article is not meant to prove that I was right, because I still do not know the answer myself. It simply explains where I invested my time, how those choices shaped me, and leaves a trace of who I am now for my future self.

Choosing to See the World Outside

The 2022 gaokao—China's national college entrance examination—was certainly memorable.

I received the worst ranking of my life. Students in my score range generally stayed within the province in order to attend a stronger university rather than studying farther away. After looking through many universities I had never previously heard of, I discussed the decision with my family. I still wanted to leave the province, see somewhere new, and experience life elsewhere. Fortunately, my family was very supportive. In the end, I went south to study in a city I had never visited before.

Since I had decided to leave the province, I focused my university choices along China's southeast coast. We could submit up to ninety preferences that year; I filled in eighty-eight, divided into ambitious, realistic, and safe options. It was also the height of Zhang Xuefeng's popularity. Although the pandemic had hit the economy hard, people generally expected a rapid recovery and still made decisions according to pre-pandemic assumptions. Based on society's expectations at the time and my own interests, I selected several engineering disciplines related to computing and electronics.

Predictably, every major that interested me became much more competitive than in previous years. None of my ambitious or realistic choices admitted me. Finally, at preference number fifty-four, the computer science program at Huaqiao University accepted me.

Looking back, I do not regret that decision at all. Moving somewhere different from the environment in which I grew up, surrounded by classmates from cultural backgrounds unlike my hometown, was itself part of my university education. Under a more cautious evaluation system, perhaps I should have remained somewhere familiar and controllable, minimizing risk. But at the time, I felt that life should not be only about following an established path more efficiently. While I still had time and the cost of mistakes was low, I wanted to explore unfamiliar places.

That was probably the first time I did not choose entirely according to the “optimal solution.”

Trying to Pursue Something New

When I arrived at university, most people around me still carried the mindset of high school. They wanted postgraduate recommendation places and high GPAs, and many senior students, parents, and teachers gave us the same advice. Indeed, a metric that can be quickly quantified and compared is the easiest way to display personal ability. Even after the gaokao, we had not escaped that logic.

But after leaving high school, I wanted to try pursuing something new—something I truly wanted. I still cared about evaluation, of course. I simply did not want to keep living under the same reward function: maximize test scores in high school, maximize GPA and résumé value at university, then maximize salary and job level after graduation. Every step appears reasonable and efficient. But if we never stop to ask, “What are these metrics actually meant to serve?”, it is easy to surrender our real curiosity, sensitivity, and judgment while optimizing our way forward.

Even in high school, I bought many university textbooks, including Chen Yuezen's General Biology and Fundamentals of Organic Chemistry, along with popular-science books about physics. I wanted to understand the knowledge I was studying and see whether there were deeper explanations, so I began teaching myself many subjects. These textbooks did not always help. University chemistry books, for example, had a fairly negative effect on my high-school grades. Their conclusions differed from the simplified conclusions taught in high school, and I would mix up the reasoning from the university texts. I overthought questions, worked more slowly, and often got them wrong.

The signs were already there in high school. I paid little attention to “how to score more points on this particular test.” I simply believed that if I mastered the knowledge, the score would follow naturally. Only after the gaokao did I realize that, when it comes to examinations, understanding the subject is not enough; you must also understand why it is being tested. Only by mastering both can you score well. I had never considered the “why” behind the exam, so I wandered somewhat off course.

Just after my first year began, my older cousin recommended csdiy and the Survival Guide for Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I began reading what people who had excelled under the gaokao evaluation system had written. Their ideas resonated deeply with me, and, with a somewhat adolescent sense of idealism, I wanted to become as ambitious and principled as they were. So I decided to spend less energy fighting over GPA points, learn more of what genuinely interested me, and explore some of society's overlooked corners.

Writing this now, I cannot avoid wondering whether the decision “not to pursue GPA” reflected courage, or whether laziness was mixed into it as well. The important thing, however, is not the slogan but what I actually accomplished. Otherwise, simply rejecting one evaluation system only means falling into another, vaguer form of self-congratulation.

Next, I want to talk about what I gained.

Friendship: The People I Lived Alongside

The most immediate benefit of not treating GPA as my only objective was my relationship with my classmates.

I got along well with everyone in my class, and most of the time we had no direct conflicts of interest. We helped whenever we could and tried our best to share joy and experience it together. I gained several sincere friendships during university. Some classmates, partly influenced by me, began exploring their own interests, exercised with me, and attended symphony concerts. Together, we left many wonderful memories in the vast playground that was Xiamen. Through their experiences and hobbies, I also found my way into several circles, discovered more common interests, and spent a rich and comfortable university life.

This mattered greatly to me. An intense evaluation system can easily turn everyone around us into an invisible object of comparison: his grade, her rank, who received an opportunity, and who earned one more bonus point. Over time, another person's success becomes a threat, while another person's failure becomes a source of reassurance. That is not a comfortable way to live.

I am grateful that I did not remain trapped in that kind of relationship throughout university. My classmates were, first of all, people who shared their lives with me; they should not have been seen only as competitors blocking my path. Those relationships gave me people I could ask for help, joke with, eat with, and walk beside whenever I felt anxious. None of this fits neatly onto a résumé, yet it was one of the most genuine things I gained during those four years.

Reading and Society: Widening My View of the World

The second thing I gained was knowledge outside my major and the many books I read.

I worked through part of Mankiw's Principles of Economics and tried reading the Selected Works of Mao Zedong and The Communist Manifesto. They made me recognize the distance between my own thinking and the ideals of a Communist Party member, while giving me a firmer position and a more flexible perspective. Because my classmates were interested in Japanese culture, I read several novels by Haruki Murakami and Yasunari Kawabata, along with The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, an American perspective on Japanese culture. Through them, I also watched a good deal of anime and became familiar with ACG culture.

None of these things became a quantifiable achievement, but they genuinely made me less like a person who could only solve questions and complete assigned tasks. When meeting strangers, I could try to find shared topics and quickly establish common ground and interests. People need some apparently “useless” input before they can understand why others live as they do, why society operates as it does, and why they themselves become anxious, angry, or moved by public events.

My third gain may have been contact with society. I rarely joined volunteer activities organized inside the university, nor did I participate in simple events just to accumulate volunteer hours and improve my postgraduate-recommendation prospects. Instead, I spent more time talking with people on the street, helping in local communities, and meeting people who were seriously building lives in Xiamen. I also met many peers who had not been as fortunate as I was in their educational opportunities but still worked hard in their own ways.

Those experiences reduced much of my anxiety and internal exhaustion about society. Once I had seen specific people, many of the abstract, polarized stories endlessly fighting and belittling one another online became less absolute. Everyone was living in their own way: some fortunate, some struggling, some confused, some resilient. After meeting them, it became much harder to understand life as a simple ranking table, and I grew more confident that my chosen direction had something worthwhile in it.

Contact with society was also good for my mental health. If someone understands themselves only through meritocracy's coordinate system, it is easy to remain forever “not good enough”: the university is not prestigious enough, the grades are not high enough, the project is not impressive enough, the family background is not distinguished enough, and the future is not certain enough. Real people are far more complex and abundant than those labels. As Chairman Mao once said:

To struggle against Heaven is endless joy; to struggle against Earth is endless joy; to struggle with people is endless joy.

Fitness: An Unexpected Gain

I had always been overweight before university. Then, in the second semester of my second year of high school, I became desk mates with one of my best friends and suddenly lost around fifteen kilograms. He enjoyed working out, so I learned from him (apparently I am quite accustomed to learning from the people around me, hehe). I have exercised ever since.

Although I had trained for roughly four years by graduation, I still carried some extra fat and had not built an especially impressive physique. Yet the decision to exercise benefited me enormously and continues to make many parts of life easier. First, my physical condition improved, and I became less prone to illness and colds. Second, I gained strength: sometimes I could sit and play games for twenty-four hours straight, sleep once, and wake up refreshed rather than suffering terrible back pain. Most importantly, I learned about the body through training. Combined with what I had studied in high-school biology, I learned how different parts of daily life affect hormone secretion, developed reasonably good habits, understood what my body needed, avoided many overpriced pseudoscientific products, and maintained fairly good health.

Fitness also introduced me to many friends in society. They came from different professions and carried very different experiences. I met students from different countries and regions through working out as well.

From a utilitarian perspective, fitness can be packaged as discipline, image management, or a productivity tool. But a healthy body, a stable rhythm of life, genuine social connections, and moments spent training together are already part of one's quality of life. Their value is not that they let me stay awake longer in the next round of competition. They are about developing myself as fully as possible, caring for both mind and body.

Competitions and Projects: Learning to Do Real Work Beyond the Results

During my undergraduate years, I participated in several competitions. I learned the most from mathematical modeling competitions and from one Student Innovation Project. Beyond professional knowledge, the methods of teamwork left the deepest impression on me.

Mathematical Modeling

In a three-day mathematical modeling competition, we received a problem and had only three days to produce a complete paper. Whatever the circumstances, that was challenging. Even with AI, we still needed a basic understanding of the algorithms and had to analyze which methods suited the data before using AI-assisted programming to solve the actual problem.

We disagreed many times along the way. I generally believed that problems like Questions A and B in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling, which required us to model and analyze real-world problems, were more challenging and interesting. I preferred those. But my teammates and I chose data-analysis problems in every official competition because we wanted the safer option, and I agreed that doing so gave us a much better chance of winning an award. As computer science students, we did not understand specialized physics as clearly as students in the relevant disciplines. Data-analysis questions overlapped more with our own knowledge: we usually applied several machine-learning algorithms, fit a plausible result, and wrote a paper around it.

During competitions, we often stayed awake for two nights in a row, and emotional fluctuations were inevitable. As team leader, my main responsibilities were to keep everyone's emotions from damaging efficiency; complete the work according to our plan and division of responsibilities; determine the direction of our solution; use our familiarity with the relevant knowledge to develop an approach and convince my teammates why it best suited us; and, after mistakes, steer us back on course and prioritize solving the problem.

I gradually figured these things out by reflecting on mistakes after making them. We abandoned our first mathematical modeling competition the day before submission. The main reason was that, as the person who had brought the team together, I had failed to lead. The other two classmates did not know each other well, so everyone felt awkward and hesitated to express their real thoughts. I understood similar lessons only after making each mistake once: the importance of communication, how to align progress quickly, how to change direction rapidly, and so on...

Competitions are naturally driven strongly by metrics: awards, ratings, certificates, and bonus points in comprehensive assessments. But I later discovered that what remained was not the certificate. It was how to review a failure, move forward when a team disagreed, and help everyone continue trusting one another under enormous pressure. These abilities are not easily captured by a scoring rubric, but they are much closer to “doing real work.”

Student Innovation Project: A First Taste of Research

A senior student recommended the Student Innovation Project, saying I could learn a great deal from it. I contacted my undergraduate advisor on my own initiative, found a direction that both my teammates and I found reasonably interesting, finalized the project topic, and began a year-long research experience.

At first, the work consisted mostly of documentation. It was my first time revising a project proposal over and over. Thanks to my advisor's patient guidance, I gradually learned how to communicate with a university supervisor—which required a very different relationship from talking with teachers in primary or secondary school—and how a standard formal document should be written. Throughout my two years of simple undergraduate research practice, I was deeply grateful to my advisor.

In terms of teamwork, a year-long project with four students was considerably harder than a mathematical modeling contest. First, I needed to ensure that everyone genuinely learned knowledge they could use later. Second, as team leader, I should have selected the technology stack and direction promptly, organized offline activities so everyone could get to know one another, assigned responsibilities clearly, and checked progress regularly. I did none of those things well. Messages between us often went unanswered for one or two weeks, and our progress fell far behind that of other teams. That was the period when I felt most anxious: I feared that failing to complete the project would harm everyone, but I also did not want to give up so easily.

After the midterm defense, I began reading The Mythical Man-Month, which our introductory computer science teacher had recommended in my first year. I started to recognize my management and communication problems and adjusted in time. Fortunately, we ultimately completed the project successfully.

The project was also the first time I truly recognized how important communication is. Before the midterm, I was afraid to contact my advisor because my own progress was slow and I feared being criticized. Only later did I understand that an advisor's role is primarily to guide, and that I should proactively report progress and communicate.

As mentioned earlier, I had good relationships with my classmates. They listened patiently to many of my complaints, quietly supported and comforted me, and even invited me out to clear my head. I remain deeply grateful to them.

The Student Innovation Project may resemble a system especially vulnerable to Reward Hacking. Project-completion materials, defenses, and output requirements all leave plenty of room for manipulation. You can turn the project into a beautiful yet hollow set of documents, or treat it as an awkward but genuine exercise in research and collaboration. I would not claim that I did especially well—in many places, I performed poorly. But the experience at least taught me that enthusiasm alone cannot complete a real project. It requires communication, planning, and divided responsibility. It also requires admitting problems and reorganizing when progress has become terrible. The final result mattered far less than what I learned throughout the process.

From what I observed, quite a few Student Innovation Projects were so-called “inherited family projects.” I personally watched one project complete its defense in the cohort before mine, then successfully reappear as a newly approved project in my own cohort—with the same group of teachers hearing the defense and approving the next version. Perhaps that is why people say these projects can be superficial. At the same time, I also found many students online who, like me, began without existing resources and continued working hard. Whether or not you start with those resources, I still recommend trying it. People truly grow a great deal in the process of doing something real.

Renting an Apartment: Living Independently for the First Time

To complete the innovation project, I assembled a desktop computer, but our dorm rooms had been converted from four occupants to six and did not allow desktop towers. When working on the project, I often became absorbed in debugging until three or four in the morning. To avoid disturbing my roommates and to have a more focused environment, I explained the situation to my family and rented an apartment for two years. It was not far from the university, but living independently was an experience I had never had before.

Handling procedures, cleaning and organizing, and finally getting the chance to cook for myself were all novel experiences.

These experiences were difficult to count within the university's evaluation system. Nobody gives you extra points for learning to cook, paying utility bills, cleaning a room, or organizing your own schedule. Yet I increasingly believe that independent living is itself part of university. It slowly changed me from someone whose life was arranged by others into someone responsible for maintaining my own order.

Growth does not always happen in classrooms, laboratories, or competitions. Sometimes it happens after tidying a desk in the early hours of the morning and realizing that you really can keep your life running, one small piece at a time.

No GPA Myth, but No Effortless Freedom Either

If I wrote only about the benefits, this article would become self-defense—an attempt to force myself to believe my own story.

The negative consequences genuinely frustrated me. Because I did not prioritize GPA, my final score was 3.97 out of 5.00, which looked less impressive beside the 4.0-plus GPAs of those ranked ahead of me. I missed the university's postgraduate-recommendation quota by only two places, with a very small difference in score. Had I improved a few minor-course grades, perhaps I would have gained another year to attempt something bolder. If I could do it again, I would certainly try to find a more delicate balance and avoid missing that opportunity. Yet I also understand deeply that, if time rewound, I would probably make the same choices I made then.

This is why I am now more cautious when talking about “rejecting Reward Hacking.” Rejecting a single metric is not the same as ignoring the rules; pursuing genuine learning does not excuse us from responsibility for results. The evaluation system has problems, but it also controls access to many opportunities. My GPA was not exceptionally high, but my reasonably good ranking and learning experience did, in fact, give me many opportunities. My father often tells me:

A person must understand the rules and make use of them. If you fail to understand the rules at all, you can pay an enormous price at a critical moment.

So I do not want to summarize these four years with the attention-grabbing but irresponsible slogan, “I refused to compete, so I was free.” More accurately, I was constantly making immature tradeoffs between freedom and opportunity, interests and metrics, long-term growth and short-term admission tickets. I still endorse some of those choices; others return at night as regrets.

I also regard those regrets as part of who I am now. They remind me that a genuinely good strategy for life cannot simply oppose an evaluation system for opposition's sake. It must understand the power of metrics while refusing to be completely ruled by them. As I learned in high school, you need to understand the knowledge itself and also why that knowledge appears on the exam.

What Exists Beyond Meritocracy?

These experiences almost summarize my university years: self-study, fitness, competitions, projects, renting an apartment, and countless hours “wasted” with friends that nevertheless became infinitely precious. They are quick to list, yet I vividly remember every detail, challenge, and stroke of luck. The train is almost at the station, so I should bring this article to an end as well.

Even after writing it, I still do not have an elegant answer. Four years at university helped me understand meritocracy's appeal more deeply: it is clear, direct, and comparable. It tells you where you rank and how to work toward the next step. For many ordinary people, it is also a relatively fair channel for upward mobility.

But I increasingly doubt whether it can serve as life's highest objective. When someone constantly confirms their value by being “better than others,” it becomes difficult to stop and ask: Does what I learned make me freer? Does what I create truly matter? Are my relationships with others more sincere? Am I learning to understand a larger world, or merely climbing inside an ever-smaller ranking table?

Perhaps life needs an objective better than meritocracy.

It should not deny effort, dismiss ability, or dress laziness up as enlightenment. But it should be broader than “beating other people.” It should have room for genuine learning, concrete love, understanding society, the joy of creation, physical health, and memories of living alongside the people around us. It should also make room for all those moments that no metric records but that truly help a person grow.